AGENTS.md Works Best Written as Code, Not Prose, for AI Coding Agents

Developers using AI coding agents often face a recurring problem: the agent repeats the same mistakes each session because it retains no memory between conversations. A project-level file called AGENTS.md is designed to solve this by giving the agent a permanent set of instructions it re-reads at the start of every session. However, most users see little improvement because they write the file as descriptive prose, which AI agents tend to treat as ambiguous background rather than actionable directives. The key distinction, according to the author, is that AGENTS.md should be written like code — with precise, imperative rules covering commands, forbidden patterns, and restricted files — rather than like human-facing documentation. Anthropic data cited in the article suggests engineers fully delegate only 0–20% of AI tasks, and proper agent configuration, not model capability, is identified as the missing factor.